by Mark Henwick
“Empty?” I thought at Kaothos.
Tullah shook her head.
The last door led down to the garage by a narrow set of steps.
The light switch wasn’t working, but my eyes could see well enough. We walked down, Tullah brushing the wall with her hand.
Most of the space was taken up by bulk-buy house supplies, power tools, a workbench with plastic sheets covering it, and a lime-green Kawasaki off-road motorbike propped on its kickstand. There was nowhere to hide.
The door at the top of the stairs closed.
The click that followed wasn’t the lock. It was the slide action of a large caliber automatic. I didn’t get to see what type because I was blinded by a powerful flashlight.
“Hold it right there.”
Suckered. A hiding space behind the door. Impossible to see with the door open.
“We’re holding,” I said, and spread my arms wide, with the hands open.
I figured if we were going to be shot, it would have been while we were looking the other way. It takes something else to shoot someone who’s looking at you, and I didn’t think Savannah Copeland had reached that point quite yet. If I could keep my throat demon under control, maybe she wouldn’t get there while she was pointing a gun at us. I could hope.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Amber Farrell, House Farrell,” I said quietly. “And this is Tullah. I came here because Larry asked me to come.”
My wolf ears could pick out the little intake of breath at his name.
“I don’t know you. Why should I believe you? Why hasn’t he called?”
Tears weren’t far away.
“You know, don’t you?” It was as gentle as I could make it.
The flashlight trembled.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“I’m sorry. Yes, he is.”
“Did you kill him?”
I could feel the blind anger lashing out in the words, and I could almost feel the pressure growing on the trigger.
“No. Van, he was betrayed by House Romero and sent to Denver. I did what I could. I offered to take him into House Farrell, and he agreed, but before we could—”
“Why should I believe you?” she shouted.
“I don’t know how I can prove it, Van, but I have the directions he drew. He wanted us to come and help you, so he gave me the directions. May I take it out of my pocket?”
“You’ve got a gun. I know you have. Don’t try anything or I’ll kill you.”
“Amber, it’s in the other jacket,” Tullah said.
Shit. She was right. I was still wearing the jacket I’d taken from the Warder.
“I can describe it,” Tullah said. “Larry drew a map that you could only see if you folded the paper top left to bottom right and then fold the sides in so it looks a bit like a maple leaf. Then you had to shine a light through it and the lines all matched up.”
The sound of harsh breathing came from the darkness at the top of the stairs.
We’d done almost as much as we could in the short time we’d had.
“We have to pass control back to her now,” I said through Kaothos. “And just wait.”
The next thing she said or did was critical.
A round through my head would be very critical.
“Why didn’t you come sooner?” The flashlight was starting to wobble. Even if you lift weights, a big automatic is heavy to hold straight out like she was. But I could feel the pressure ease off the trigger, even if she wasn’t aware of it.
“We came as soon as we understood the puzzle,” I said.
She wasn’t listening. “If you’d come sooner, they wouldn’t be dead,” she sobbed. “Sal and Rob, and now Claude. They wouldn’t be dead.”
A sudden anger exploded in my gut, catching me off balance. My House.
Larry’s kin had names now, and they’d been snatched away from me.
I had to take deep breaths until my heart stopped racing. Now, my hands were trembling too.
“Tell us what happened, please.” My voice sounded strained.
“When…when Larry disappeared and we couldn’t get through to the Diakon, and then we couldn’t get through to any others, I got the four of us to hide here. I’m supposed to be the head of his kin.” She was crying freely now, the flashlight and gun sinking down. I could make out her shadowy figure behind them.
“But I didn’t have everything ready. There’s just the security room. There wasn’t enough food. We ran out of cash and we didn’t want to use the cards until we knew what was happening. It was my responsibility and I failed. Rob and Sal took the car to go back to the town house. There was stuff there they were going to bring back.”
She sank back onto the steps, sobs racking her body. I wanted to do something, but the gun was still waving around and she was hardly aware of it.
“They never came back,” she said. “Why didn’t I tell them not to go?”
Hindsight was wonderful. I wasn’t going to second-guess her, and I needed her to move on.
“What about the other guy, Claude?”
I was pretty sure that the gun was now only accidentally pointed at me, but I’d rather be deliberately killed than accidentally killed, so I stayed at the bottom of the steps.
“Claude wanted to go down and talk to the wolves.” She hiccupped. “Even though they scare the shit out of us. He said they’d tell us what had happened.”
I could hear the pride fighting with all the other emotions in there.
“I told him he couldn’t. It was too dangerous. We’d have to wait for Larry. And I couldn’t even stay awake. Now he’s gone.”
I could imagine it. Living in the tiny security room most of the time, creeping out to use the house and then scrubbing it clean so it looked as if they weren’t there, and creeping back. The shame of not being ready for this. The food running out. The pressure to make decisions. The pressure when decisions went wrong. The self-doubt. The exhaustion. It was amazing she had lasted this long.
“Claude is kin?” I asked.
“Yes.”
Lie.
“He’s not, is he, Van?”
“Brother,” she whispered. “My little brother. I was supposed to protect him.”
And there was a sound, a heavy truck stopping right outside.
Tullah and I looked at each other.
“Van, I’m worried about that truck. It’s not garbage collection or deliveries, is it?”
“No. It’s just a coincidence. Claude would never betray me.”
“I’m not saying that,” I said.
Even if that was the most likely thing—that Claude had been caught and tortured into revealing this location. The why, we’d have to deal with later.
“Look, I’m trained to deal with this, but you’ve got to let me do it. You stay down here.”
The truck engine was still running. It made a lot of noise, probably enough to mask the sound of small arms gunfire. Cab doors slammed. Someone was coming up the drive.
Savannah slid off the steps and dropped down to the floor of the garage.
Without the flashlight in my eyes I saw a woman barely older than Tullah, slight but stringy-tough, Native American totem tattoos snaking down her arms, platinum blonde hair cropped close to the scalp and eyes that were close to despair. She was looking blankly at the automatic in her hand as if she’d forgotten she’d been holding it.
“Just wait here. You’ll be okay now,” I whispered, pulling the Browning .45 gently out of her grasp. Then I ran up the stairs with Tullah close behind.
Chapter 25
There were two men in courier delivery uniforms coming up the drive. Their van was blocking any view from the road. The first guy was carrying a clipboard and a red document zip bag, while the second was struggling alone with a large box. He put it down in front of the garage, while Mr. Clipboard gave the house and the Hill Bitch a once-over. They were professional, trained for a job that had nothing to do with deliveries.
&nbs
p; “Stall him at the door,” I said to Tullah. “Whatever you do, don’t put any part of your body in front of the door. Gun in hand, safety off, finger on the guard, ’prentice. If he comes through that door, kill him.”
I looked into her eyes. No one is ever ready. I wondered what I’d looked like when Top had stared into my eyes like that. If I could, I would take the action away from her, but if I couldn’t, I thought she’d handle it.
I ran up into the bedrooms and checked that there wasn’t anyone coming up behind the house. No—they weren’t expecting any serious resistance. Behind me I heard the doorbell.
Eight seconds, said the little timer in my head.
Mr. Clipboard had a pistol in that zip bag. Mr. Box had ten gallons of gasoline and a lighter. And I’d bet there was a third guy in the van.
Six seconds. I let myself out of the window and landed quietly on the ground.
“Who is it?” Tullah called out, her voice shaky.
“Haul ’Em Parcels, ma’am. Delivery for...ah…Copeland.” He had the bored tone down pat. “That you?”
Four seconds.
“I’ll need to see some ID.”
Oh, good call, Tullah.
I crept up to the corner and checked the HK.
“I can’t see it from there.” I heard Tullah’s voice. “Hold it up to the peephole.”
“Tell Tullah: DON’T get in front of the door,” I said to Kaothos urgently, hoping I was in range.
Two seconds.
“Can you see that now, ma’am?”
“Yes—”
He shot right through the door. Four shots. With the silencer it was no more than a pop-pop-pop-pop.
I came around the corner in a crouch, double-handed grip on the HK pointed at him.
He’d dropped the clipboard. His gun, clumsy with the silencer attached, was out of the bag. He had his weight back, about to shoulder charge the door, when he saw me and started to swing his gun at me.
Tap, tap. Tap.
And I was already pointing at Mr. Box.
He scrabbled for a gun he had in a belt clip in the small of his back. Lousy place for a draw.
Tap, tap. Tap.
Two down.
“TULLAH!”
“I’m fine.”
There was a whir from the front of the house and the high-pitched snarl of an engine.
What the hell?
I ran down the steps, just in time to see Savannah thread the Kawasaki through the gap left by the van and go screaming down the road, front wheel lifting off the tarmac as she whipped it through the gears.
And the driver came sprinting around the side of the van, gun already leveled at me.
Tullah fired at the same time as I did, so for her first, she got one of those where you can say to yourself that no one could be sure you actually killed the guy.
She was still staring at him down the barrel of her Sig when I came up and put the safety on. I got in front of her.
“Go inside,” I said.
She turned wide eyes to me. “What…Savannah…where?”
“I think I know what happened.” I took Tullah’s Sig and snugged it back into her holster. “When I said Claude wasn’t kin, she thought it meant I didn’t care what had happened to her little brother. Then, in her eyes, we practically accused him of telling these guys where she was.”
“She’s gone to find him?”
“Yup. She’s gone to get her little brother back.”
“But where?”
“No. Were. W-e-r-e. He went to talk to the werewolves,” I said, turning her towards the open garage and giving her a push. Keeping her busy would keep her mind off what she’d done. “Now, I’m betting that Savannah had some bulk purchases of cleaning stuff in the house. Go grab us some bleach.”
I pulled the plastic sheeting off the workbenches, tore it into sections and started to roll the bodies.
It took us twenty minutes, but we got the bodies wrapped in plastic and in the back of the van. The steps and drive we cleaned down with bleach and power-sprayed it all away.
I found some sealant and duct tape. Using them, I patched together a temporary repair of the front door.
None of it would fool the police for more than a minute if they decided to look, but who was going to report it? Not the Warders. I didn’t want a genuine delivery man to turn up and find bullet holes.
We left a note for Savannah giving one of our burn phone numbers, just in case, and locked up behind ourselves. Then I drove the delivery van down to a truck stop diner and left it. The dead guys hadn’t had a real comms system, just cell phones. I left one of the cells in the cab, switched on. The Warders would zero in on it and then they could clean up their own mess.
All the rest of their small gear I stored in the zip bag and slung that into the back of the Hill Bitch. Cell phones were off and SIM cards taken out. This hit team had been working to a protocol; the calls and data had been erased, but Matt might still be able to dig something out of them. Even better, they’d used GPS to find Smoketree Drive, and the route hadn’t been erased.
I climbed back into the cab of the Hill Bitch.
“Let’s go find a motel,” I said. “I need a shower.”
Tullah drove without speaking. Every now and then she took a breath as if she were going to say something.
I could guess what it was.
“No,” I said. “It doesn’t get better. It shouldn’t get easier. If it does, that’s the time to worry.”
She nodded and turned onto Route 66.
Chapter 26
After our showers we went back out and found a diner, where we ordered a late lunch.
“What now?” Tullah asked when our spice-rubbed steaks arrived.
“We work on our one and only lead in this town: Savannah.”
“I don’t follow.”
“What happened downtown?” I said.
“We got chased by a group of Warders.”
“Think that through.”
She chewed on her chili with steak garnish.
“The Warders didn’t just stumble across us. They were warned.”
“What does that tell you?”
“They set something up to watch for someone like us.” She thought some more. “That takes time and local contacts. House Romero has to have been cooperating with them. Doesn’t that prove Romero has gone over to Basilikos and Diana’s been captured?”
I grimaced. “Not enough for me to go back to Naryn.”
“Warders running around Albuquerque and hunting down kin is ‘not enough’? What will it take?”
“I just need a bit more,” I said. “Bian and Naryn think it’s Jaworski or Romero himself.”
“You’re not sure?”
“Diana didn’t think Jaworski had gone over. But he’s the Diakon for the Santa Fe Romero. Charles Romero has another guy who’s Diakon here in Albuquerque: Jiaro Amaral. Savannah’s got to have some idea about what’s going on and whether it involves all Romero, or just some of them. She might also have heard something about Diana. There had to be a reason that she was being hunted.”
“Okay, but how are we going to find her?”
“Maybe she went to the Were club that Dominé warned us about. Or maybe they’d have an idea where she went.”
“Amber, I thought you wanted to keep away from the Were.”
“I do. But Savannah is part of my House now. I have to talk to them.”
“These are the rabid, kill-’em-first, ask-questions-later wolves. Can’t wait. That’ll be so much fun. How do you manage to talk without getting your face eaten off?”
“We have a friend who can give us an introduction. I’m going to ask Dominé if she can call ahead and tell them why I’m coming in.”
“That’s not the same as an invitation, is it?”
“No.” I had to admit it wasn’t.
“Permission to speak my mind, Boss.”
Meaning she was asking to say something that would otherwise have got her head bit
ten off. I eyed her. She didn’t pull that sort of thing often with me. She didn’t need to.
“Yeah?”
“You’re making decisions and then making up justifications for them. You want to go after Savannah because you feel she’s your House. It’s, whatever you call it, the Athanate imperative.”
I gritted my teeth. I couldn’t argue against her assessment. “I can do this, Tullah. I can pull it off.”
Tullah sighed. She could see I was going to do it no matter how much she objected. “I hope so,” she said.
“Amber, this is not safe.” Dominé shared Tullah’s view of my idea, her voice crackling on the speakerphone when we called from the motel. “I’m not their friend, I’m just a client they protect for money.”
“I know,” I said. “But these guys have to have the same concerns the rest of the paranormal world has. Whatever their reputation, they can’t go killing people randomly. That means they have some restraint. I’m not threatening them, and they shouldn’t have any interest in my friends. Why would they want to keep them?”
“But if they are keeping them, for whatever reason, why should they treat us any differently?” Tullah said. “Maybe they’re pissed off with Athanate. Maybe they’re the reason there are Warders downtown. If they’ve got them, they’re risking a confrontation by taking Romero kin, so why would House Altau mean any more to them?”
They were both right. I was rocking back and forth, busting my brain to come up with an argument that they’d missed.
I couldn’t.
But I couldn’t just turn around and leave. I was an Athanate, the leader of a House, and Savannah was part of that House. The thought of abandoning her felt like breaking my leg and grinding the shattered edges together. As nothing but a human, maybe I’d be able to walk away. Maybe.
“Hélas,” Dominé said. “I see it is not a matter for rational thought. Very well, I will take you there.”
“No. Dominé, just tell me where, give me a name and number. You can’t come.”
“Why, because it is too dangerous? Why is that a reason for one and not the other? Besides, I am safest of all of us. They have an income from me, and that is something they are rational about.”